Romania 2000

Holiday in Costinesti

After several months I let my colleague Gabriele convince me to try this new experience in an eastern country. Romania, that is! He, along with a friend of his, Gianni, has already been there twice, but this time there are as many as six of us starting out (Me, Gabriele, Enrico, Gianni, Davide and Davidino). Destination: Costinesti. Lufthansa flight 575,000 lire round trip Turin/Munich/Bucharest. From the airport a taxi to the railway station where we take the train to Costinesti. On the train we begin to have our first touching experiences, a Roma child opens the compartment door asking for alms and throws himself on the ground kissing Gianni's feet, who, taken by embarrassment, hands him 500 lei (for us 50 lire!). From the windows the landscape is rather poor and you can see kilometers and kilometers of uncultivated land. After about 5 hours we arrive in Costinesti.

The station has only one track and a small ticket office. We head to the Forum Hotel where we have booked 3 twin rooms. Costinesti is a peculiar town, in fact the government provides students with small bungalows at truly modest prices and consequently the town is invaded by young people. The music is very different from ours, it has a style that recalls Turkish music but in a dance version. No commercial music or house, just a bit of hip-pop. The discos are three: Il Ring, Il Tineretului and il Vox Maris (with a pool and supermarket attached, but not for every pocket). The seafront is invaded by street vendors making gogosi (nauseating sweets), mici (minced meat and lamb meatballs, good) and of course pizza (which they ruin by spreading kilos of ketchup on it).

Of course, being six of us, you can't imagine the mess we made, but the most active of all are the two Davides who go on a rampage with women. Romanians understand Italian well because besides being a Latin language like Romanian, they watch our films with subtitles and so some words always stick in their minds. I also learned something in Romanian (thanks to a girl who spoke good Italian), just the essentials to survive like the numbers, the verbs to be and to have and a few of the most frequent questions and I must say it is very similar to our language. The things that struck me most are the towns or villages without light and without paved roads that evoke post-war Italy, the lack of stress in their daily life (in fact in the bars they took forever to serve you), the dirty sea (Black Sea by name and by nature) and unfortunately a fairly widespread poverty.

The positive things instead are contained in the culture very different from ours, the beautiful women, the simplicity of the people, the manners and hospitality. We were hosted for dinner by three Romanian women who prepared ciorba (vegetable soup), mici and other specialties of their cuisine. A gesture I will not easily forget. During the various days spent there we had the chance to go to Neptun (former summer residence of Ceausescu) a town much more modern than Costinesti, much more touristy and obviously more expensive. Like all vacations, the time to return home arrived and reluctantly we say goodbye to little Costinesti thanking it for the emotions it offered us.